Teaching Annotation

Click on the picture above to view a slideshow used by Teresa G in social theory. This suggests some useful annotation practices using a short excerpt by Nicholas Carr. In this case, the text is about knowledge retention in the digital age, so the content serves to support the activity.

This slideshow/annotated text to demonstrate how to:

• Underline topic sentences to get to the core of the paragraph.

• Put key points into students' own words on the side margins.

• Sketch causal arguments using arrows.

• Write short summaries of the main argument at the top of the page.

Ideally, this kind of exercise entails reading the text together as a class. In our sample annotation from Carr, the students read the extract in class making a first pass at annotation before going through the slideshow above.

A slower but valuable exercise is to create a collective annotation through class discussion. One simple way is to share a screen with Acrobat or whatever you use to mark up a pdf, discussing possible annotations with students. Another approach is to make the exercise more truly collaborative using google docs, xodo or hypothes.is.